How it helped create a massive public-health disaster.
You can guess what this one is about. It killed my father. I wish I could tell it to prepare to die, but it may finally be happening, anyway.
[Update a while later]
Ron Bailey reviews a new book
Category Archives: Culinary
Calorie Counting
Why it’s “almost useless and misleading.”
No, actually, it’s worse than useless.
Michelle’s School Lunch Program
The reign of terror is almost over. What’s not mentioned, though, is that even if the kids were eating the food, it’s not healthy for them. Low grains are only a little less terrible than refined ones, and low fat constitutes physical child abuse, because they need fat to grow their brains.
The Diet That Cannot Be Named
This mouse study seems very promising, but there is a word missing here:
In consideration of the challenges and side effects associated with prolonged fasting in humans, we developed a low-calorie, low-protein and low-carbohydrate but high-fat 4-day fasting mimicking diet (FMD) that causes changes in the levels of specific growth factors, glucose, and ketone bodies similar to those caused by water-only fasting (Brandhorst et al., 2015) (see also Figure S1 for metabolic cage studies). Here, we examine whether cycles of the FMD are able to promote the generation of insulin-producing β cells and investigate the mechanisms responsible for these effects.
It’s called “ketogenic,” people. Kee Toe Jen Ick. Low carb, high fat.
Cancer
…as a metabolic disease. A long but interesting essay.
At least the community is starting to wake up to the hazards of sugar. I’ve seen a proposal to make food stamps ineligible for items containing it. Makes sense to me. It could help a lot with the obesity epidemic.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related thoughts from Glenn Reynolds.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Health authorities continue to fail us:
Considering the above, no one in their right mind would take any kind of dietary advice provided by the authorities at face value. It’s little wonder then that so many are taking matters into their own hands. Thirty years ago, if the USDA, AHA, or AMA told you something was bad for you, you stopped eating it. You didn’t question, because they were the ones with credibility and years of study. It was simply too much trouble for the average person to find the information they needed. Thankfully with the internet, all of the information needed is now available to anyone who wants it. We no longer have to put blind trust in authority figures because we can sift through the information ourselves and ask the right questions. If anything, the glut of information shows that the public’s trust in nutrition advice given by the authorities and media was sorely misplaced.
Same thing with climate, for the same reasons: there’s a lot of public policy, and money, at stake.
The Mystery Of Coffee
We don’t know much more about it than we do.
Pig-Human Organ Farming
“…doesn’t look promising yet.”
First attempt to create pig-human chimeras for organ farming doesn’t go as planned https://t.co/a74D2IyMJI title like from *The Onion*
— Razib Khan (@razibkhan) January 26, 2017
[Update a while later]
On the other hand, there’s this: They’re figuring out how to make store-bought tomatoes taste good. But we have to encourage them:
Consumers, known to gravitate towards the least expensive option, will have to vote with their wallets to keep flavorful tomato options on market shelves.
“The next time you’re in the store, you might consider paying a little more for a more flavorful tomato,” Klee says. If you do, you might find that the tomatoes of the future taste a little sweeter.
As someone who does shop price on tomatoes, I’ll have to try that. Lately I’ve been using fresh where I used to use canned, partly to avoid the extra salt (though you can get canned with no salt added). I may try better ones in my next tomato sauce.
[Update a few minutes later]
Forget growing organs in pigs; we may be able to 3-D print them soon.
The Invisible Graveyard
We need an FDA commissioner who sees it. That also would apply to criminally terrible government dietary advice.
The Paleo Diet
Gee, so it turns out that it won’t kill you after all:
Even short-term consumption of a Paleolithic-type diet improved glucose control and lipid profiles in people with type 2 diabetes compared with a conventional diet containing moderate salt intake, low-fat dairy, whole grains and legumes.
The biggest nightmare for Big Pharma is that we can treat Type 2 diabetes (which seems to be a diet-related “disease”) with an improved diet.
Medical Incompetence And Junk Science
This is a frightening story. It’s why I try to avoid hospitals at all costs.
I asked Dr. G, who is now his personal cardiologist, if we needed to do anything to prevent his potassium from going so low again. He said, “If he stays off that drug, he will be fine.” To think that he went through all this because his GP gave him a drug to prevent heart attacks!! What a crazy world we live in.
…The blood pressure medication Dean had taken for 20 years was hydrochlorothiazide. It is the most commonly prescribed medication for blood pressure, not because it is safe or effective, but because it is the one insurance companies choose to pay for!
The dietary and general medical ignorance on display, and the rules, are almost criminal. And I’m sure this is the kind of treatment that my father got when he died of his second heart attack, in 1979. And I consider my high blood pressure (with which I’ve been living otherwise healthily for many decades) to be less risk than most of the prescribed “treatments.”